Stanford-Berkeley group gets $25 million for advanced solar research

A joint solar research effort managed by Stanford and the University of California-Berkeley has won $25 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy's SunShot Initiative. The work is aimed at helping the solar power industry overcome technical barriers and reduce the cost of solar installations.

The team, dubbed the Bay Area Photovoltaics Consortium, will fund industry-relevant research to develop and test the innovative new materials, device structures and fabrication processes necessary to produce cost-effective solar modules in high volume.

"The future of solar is clearly in cheaper, better performing photovoltaics," said Cui. "The SunShot funding and the exciting collaborative approach between the universities and national labs guided by industrial perspectives will advance all the components of solar modules that will bring down the dollar-per-watt cost dramatically."

The Consortium will involve partners from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, as well as a significant industrial affiliates program. Sixteen companies have already committed more than $1 million per year in contributions toward meeting the DOE's cost-share requirement and are active participants, helping to define the research agenda and provide a path to commercializing the emerging technologies developed under the SunShot Initiative.